Steve Statler, chief marketing officer at Wiliot, explains how the company is transforming the entire supply chain with smart tagging technology
Tell us a bit about Wiliot – when was it founded and what makes you different?
Wiliot was conceived as a follow-up to another successful wireless startup, Wilocity. That company was bought by Qualcomm for hundreds of millions of dollars. Its technology became the secret sauce that enabled the millimeter wave communications that make 5G faster than 4G, part of every cell phone.
Once that change took hold, the founders started to think about what big problems remained that could make a difference to the world. They landed on making IoT live up to its original promise. Their view was that IoT had got stuck. It had become the ‘Internet of Expensive Things’ and needed drastic improvement, a much lower price, a smaller size and more sustainable battery-free technology if it were to be viable as the connection between everything in the physical world and the power of AI. That was back in 2017. Now Wiliot (similar name to Wilocity but with IoT at the end) has developed the third generation of a computer the size of a postage stamp, that is battery free, talks Bluetooth, tracks temperature, tampering and more, all for less than the cost of an actual postage stamp.
What is the Ambient Data Platform and how is it used?
When you have smart tags on packages, food containers, medicine and clothing that are all transmitting data every second, without any tapping or scanning, the amount of data becomes a tsunami of bits and bytes. To make the processing of that data affordable and to distill it into business events that are useful triggers of workflows, you need a network of devices that can securely funnel the data to a cloud that only triggers apps when something relevant and interesting happens. That’s what Wiliot’s Ambient Data Platform does. It tells other applications, like AI apps or supply chain data control towers, when assets have been moved, loaded or unloaded and when they cross temperature thresholds. The artificial intelligence that is connected to reusable assets, letters and parcels can even flag handling issues or opportunities for improvement. These business events can power co-pilots for everyone from a CEO to a driver or postie on their route.
How do the IoT Pixels battery-free smart tags work and what applications can they be used for?
These smart tags contain a tiny antenna glued to an even smaller chip that harvests power from the radio waves that surround its use. This power comes from wi-fi, Bluetooth and other radios that are very low cost and have become ubiquitous. The previous generation of RFID used expensive readers that required manual scanning or were limited to a few choke points. In the 20+ years since this first generation of tech was developed, radios have spread so they are everywhere, so we use these for power and for communication using a protocol (Bluetooth) that is used by billions more devices than the older RFID protocol.
The applications are endless, and we are just scratching the surface – track, trace and low-cost, continuous cold chain are just the start. These tags will become part of the fabric of homes, clothing and medicine. This will drastically reduce the cost of goods, make food fresher and safer, make medicine more effective and clothing better quality and more sustainable.
We call it ambient intelligence because is will directly link the trillions of things that surround us to AI. Think of Ambient IoT as the extended nervous system for ChatGPT.
You’ve just announced a project with Royal Mail using these tags. How did this project start and what do you hope will be the outcome for Royal Mail?
Royal Mail’s digital transformation team found Wiliot online. They spent a year doing due diligence and testing the technology and another year rolling out the technology across most of their 6,500 large delivery vehicles, so they can monitor the location of the rolling cages they use to transport parcels and letters, all without manual scanning.
This gives them the opportunity to right-size the vehicles, save fuel, optimize labor and deliver a better quality of service since their systems knows what is in every rolling cage. In the future they are planning to offer temperature tracking and a real-time service to track parcels, which promises to be highly competitive and a driver of additional revenue, as well as breaking new boundaries in terms of tracking the carbon footprint of individual deliveries.
Where else are the smart tags being used?
The tags are already being used by several of the world’s largest retailers in Europe and the US. They have been tracking pallets, cases and reusables to improve on-shelf availability while reducing waste and improving product quality at the same time.
Why should the parcel and postal sector be investing in IoT technology like yours? What will be the benefits in the short and long terms?
It’s clear that ambient intelligence and IoT have much to offer in making post and parcel companies a lot more efficient, providing better quality of service and differentiated value-added services that can revitalize the sector. At its simplest this is about moving from manual scanning to pervasive sensing of every asset and item in the network. There are big opportunities to cut costs and create some new services that are key to competing with the other providers not weighed with the obligations that come with being a national institution.
The implications go beyond this. Ambient technology is just getting started. In the next three years, Ambient IoT will go beyond Bluetooth to become part of the core wi-fi, 5G and 6G standards. This opens a world where AI goes past the camera and the keyboard, spreading to the physical world.
The post and parcel sector is ideally placed to leverage its pervasive networks to spread its reach beyond last-mile delivery, upstream through supply chains to enable a level of connection between manufacturers and consumers that will make the internet disruption we have seen so far seem more like a pre-shock to a much bigger quake, as AI becomes truly integrated into supply chains.
This article was originally published in the December 2024 issue of Parcel and Postal Technology International
